Re: The HIG and Open a Copy

Hi guys,

> brother" usage
> monitoring system on AbiWord, any speculation about
> more commonly used
> or less used functions is simply blind speculation.

Nor should we necessarily let that paralyze us from
any future decision making. Leaders must make
decisions even in times of incomplete data.

We've had a history of largely mimicking MSWord's UI.
This has had its advantages and its drawbacks. Its
largest advantage is that anyone familiar with MSWord
is immediately comfortable with AbiWord. Its largest
drawback is that we've been partially constrained by
Microsoft's design decisions. Granted, they have
usability teams, usability labs, and more money than
God Himself to throw at their problems. But I
digress...

We may be at a point where we must ask ourselves -
"What do we bring to the table? What do we offer our
users that our competitors don't?"

Is our goal to clone MSWord, warts and all? OpenOffice
does that too well and have too many resources to
throw at their problems. This is a battle we can't
win, and may not even want to win.

Is our goal to be smaller, faster, and easier than our
competitors for some set of use cases? Here, I see our
strengths playing out to our advantage.

Or is it something else entirely? This is something to
be discussed in another thread.

What is *crystal clear* to me is that we can't have is
CVS HEAD being used as a UI playground, and then have
discussions about it after the fact. Even though CVS
branches are a pain in the butt, they have their uses.

Rob, if you want to, create a CVS branch to demo UI
changes. Or create more mock-ups/patches and post them
to the list and bugzilla. I think that our menus are a
cluttered, disorganized mess. And I think that a lot
of our dialogs could be simplified and reorganized to
better help our users. But we need to have these talks
before we make sweeping changes rather than
afterwords. I appreciate your enthusiasm.

Best,
Dom

                
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
All your favorites on one personal page – Try My Yahoo!
http://my.yahoo.com
Received on Tue Feb 22 00:23:06 2005